Now that the betas are out, we can finally talk about some of the sexy new stuff in more detail. With an added/changed/fixed list 150+ long (which is not even close to definitive with over 1000 commits to the source code since 0.5.3!) it is far from easy to get a quick view of what is new/improved. I know poor meme is having to play catchup with the User Guide with all our changes and he also intends to post about some of the new stuff soon too...

Here are my top 5 "you might not know this" new features that rock my world for productivity...

Go to Link or Style - In CodeView, you can ctrl-click (F3) on a class name or tag element and be taken directly to it's definition in the CSS stylesheet (either inline or linked). I find it ideal for when you want to quickly tweak a style for justification or margins. This same feature also works on an image src or anchor href to navigate to the linked image/file. Hit Ctrl+\ or toolbar Back button to return to the previous file/location.

Code View and CSS Style editing - All those toolbar buttons you use in Book View for applying styles or heading tags? Most of them now work in Code View and inline CSS/stylesheet files too. Change a <p> to a <h3>, add <i> around a selection, text-align a CSS style... You can also control whether any existing classes are retained on heading tags via a setting in the Format->Heading menu.

Regex enhancements - Never type a (?U) or (?s) again if like me you don't want to. In the Search->Regex Options menu you will also see an option to automatically tokenise when you hit Ctrl+F, which converts multiple whitespace/pretty print line feeds into \s+ for you and also escapes regex characters such as periods etc. You can also manually tokenise all or just a selection of your Find text (similar feature but adds converting numerics to \d+) by choosing "Tokenise Selection" on the right-click menu in the Find dropdown.

Find/Replace scope with ctrl+click - Tired of continually changing between "All HTML Files" and "Current File" when you switch to a CSS file or similar and back? Now you can just leave it set to "All HTML Files" and ctrl-click on any of those Find/Count/Replace/Replace All buttons if you want to temporarily perform (for instance) a replace of line heights on a CSS file, leaving the scope dropdown unchanged for when you work on an HTML tab. Works in the Search Manager too.

Clipboard History - There is a more powerful Clip Editor feature, but for my most frequent copy/paste I continuously use the Clipboard History popup (Ctrl+Alt+V) to quickly recall clipboard entries at the touch of two keystrokes. No more "what did I last copy?" and "darn, it's gone now"...

That is without even mentioning dozens of other new features, many of which are now established in my regular workflow:

Saved Searches

Clip Manager

Spelling navigation and keyboard shortcuts

Deleting unused images and styles

Edit capability in TOC generation

Inserting special characters

Change text casing

Reformatting CSS files

Create indexes & inline TOCs

Various style and file usage reports

Ease of linking stylesheets and images

Validating CSS online with W3C

Inserting links and anchors

Opening files/images with external editors

Customise the GUI fonts/sizes/colours

...and so much more...

And here are my favourite top 5 bug fixes from the countless dozens of nasty things we fixed...

Stability (Windows particularly!) - Time will tell as to how others find it, but I have been using this codebase daily for the last three months on Windows XP and Windows 7 x64. A whole bunch of race conditions and nasty legacy code was ripped out and replaced. The last crash I had (which we fixed) in editing hundreds of ebooks was over a month ago. This build of Sigil will now handle a number of the common errors when loading invalid content more gracefully. There is still more that can be done, but in my opinion this is like night and day with *any* other Sigil release before it.

Cursor positioning/scrolling - Like many of you I hated that when I switched views/tabs/did a F&R the cursor/selection would "randomly" jump to the bottom of the document, the top, or be scrolled off screen - it should no longer happen. Also page up/down in BookView now moves the cursor when it scrolls (and yes it scrolls down one page worth in this build). TOC clicking to a heading down the page now always works, rather than only if the tab was opened first.

Splitting Files - You can now split *anywhere* within or outside a paragraph in BookView or CodeView and text will be split off correctly retaining block styles if needed. No more of those blank pages because you split between <br/> tags you could not see in BookView. If you use Sigil split markers, it now iterates all html files to split in one go - not just the current file. And no more of those "rat droppings" of <p>&nbsp;</p> or similar at the top of the split page.

Find & Replace - Several gremlins got stamped on in this critical feature, including the "sometimes it won't actually replace" or "it replaced with \1 instead of the evaluated backreference". The recent history dropdowns are bumped up to 25 items instead of 15 (though the Search Manager and auto-completion helps reduce that usage). There is also now no restriction on text length for when you hit Ctrl+F to load the Find text, so it always works rather than sometimes not.

Spellcheck fixes - Various things but two in particular stand out for me. You can now add/ignore a word with curly apostrophes. And if you add/ignore a word and flip to another tab already opened the spelling highlighting on that tab is updated without having to close/reopen. More can be done in future for non-English tokenisation but "for the rest of us" it now works darned well, particularly when you assign keyboard shortcuts to whiz through a book.

The thousands of hours of effort gone from the guys into the 0.6 release over the last six months is truly epic, it has been a lot of fun to work on this. There are still a few things up our sleeves we would like to add/change/rewrite in the future, but with this release Sigil is faster, more stable, more featured and more polished than ever before.

@erickerl - Thanks for letting us know, I'll let John comment on that one, the OS X stuff is his baby. Frustrating for those of you affected I'm sure.

I will add that the other packaging issue of 32-bit Sigil and launching from the Open With plugin in calibre still exists with this release as well. So I have just pushed a new version of the Open With plugin to workaround the problem. Please do install that and you won't see the error dialog appearing before Sigil starts any more that was reported on the last thread.

Despite all the features and polishing done for this release, its the stability that is really impressive (well, ok, for OS's that it starts on ). A lot of effort has gone into restructuring the code and tracking every known crash and and every known bug and fixing them (every reported bug in the issue log has been addressed). Find & Replace is rock solid now. And loading or opening invalid files is not only more robust (e.g., working around missing container.xml files) but able to avoid just exiting. So if you have any issues with this release please post the details!

For polishing, I don't think I can remember all the little tweaks done so you can find functions where you expect them and to just do what you expect them to do. And all the comments from the first beta were taken into account for this one.

But of course, its the features that are the fun part. I'll be exhaustively documenting them in the user guide, and you'll find all
the main ones in the menus, but here are a few you might have missed:

Right-click on the text in a CSS file and you can re-format it automatically.

Right-click on the Find or Replace box and you can save a search, and load the F&R box with any of your Saved Searches.

Right-click on text in Code View and you can insert a saved clip text.

Right-click (notice a trend? ) on an image in Book View and you can jump to its tab, or open it for editing.

Right-click on the tab heading to select close all other tabs.

Double-click on a tab heading or press F2 to toggle the Book View to Code View and vice versa.

Ctrl-click on a character in the Special Character dialog to select and close the dialog.

Your view state is now remembered when you restart Sigil, so if you only use Code View you never need to see Book View.

Ctrl-space removes formatting in Book View, but can now delete tags from your selection in Code View.

Clip Manager can be used to insert tags around a selection - just use \1 in your text to paste, e.g. <span class="example">\1</spa
n>

Clip Manager, Saved Searches, Special Characters can all stay open while you edit text.

Saved Searches can be used to run your searches as an alternative to F&R.

You can select an image from disk when using Insert Image.

Insert Hyperlink lets you choose from all targets in your book, or enter others.

You can go back to the last link you clicked using the Back arrow.

Ctrl-T in Book View will show you the html tag for your location if you don't want to switch to Code View for a quick check.

Reports can show words in your book, how many times you use an image, and right-click to delete images or styles in CSS.

You can open images, text files externally and edit them and Sigil will load them when they're saved.

In the Book Browser context menu for HTML files you can create a copy of the new file instead of a blank file.

The default extension for new HTML files is .html instead of .xhtml.

When generating a TOC you can edit the title or level of TOC headings and the document will be updated to match.

@crutledge - not sure what you mean? An LOI isn't a Sigil feature, so what you posted wasn't created by Sigil. Creating an inline TOC is certainly, but when I create one it most definitely has the paths to the files, and when I close and reopen the book they are still there. Inserting Links - has full file paths. Generate TOC for NCX - has full file paths.

Are you sure your book actually had full paths in the first place for that page? Attach an example with some repro steps if you think a problem exists.

@crutledge - not sure what you mean? An LOI isn't a Sigil feature, so what you posted wasn't created by Sigil. Creating an inline TOC is certainly, but when I create one it most definitely has the paths to the files, and when I close and reopen the book they are still there. Inserting Links - has full file paths. Generate TOC for NCX - has full file paths.

Are you sure your book actually had full paths in the first place for that page? Attach an example with some repro steps if you think a problem exists.

@crutledge - all that shows is that you have some html pages that don't have file paths in their hrefs. There is no indication of what led to this or whether they ever had file paths in the first place? As I said above we need a repro case if you think Sigil is the cause - the document you actually started with which had paths, and what steps you followed which led them to be dropped.